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A Letter from the President of IFX Forum, Inc.

The IFX Forum is a member-driven organization, and the IFX Standard is a proven, practical standard for the electronic exchange of financial information. It has been suggested by industry analysts that the IFX standard can have a transformational impact in financial institutions. Adoption of the standard continues to grow. Our membership rolls continue to grow as well, with members coming from all around the globe.

We are happy at this time to announce that soon we will be introducing a set of significant improvements in the standard that will position us for another decade of growth and transformation. Collectively, we will refer to these changes as IFX 2.0.

IFX 2.0: Why mess with a good thing?!

In 1997, when the IFX Forum was founded, the business and technology landscape was remarkably different from what it is today. In order to take advantage of the best in technology and business practices, and to de-emphasize those things that didn’t work out as planned, we are making our first break with backwards compatibility.

The IFX 1.x versions are stable, well-documented standards that we will continue to support. We believe that we have weathered the changes in business and technology because:

we have always focused on the “business” in Business Message Specification;
we built the specification on sound architectural principles;
we managed ourselves to work within those principles;
we are member-driven, addressing real world requirements today;
our members are a well-rounded mix of business and technical experts from a diverse group of leading technology and service companies;
and, most of all, because we are committed to excellence as well as flexibility.

None of that changes!

We know that the main value of a standard is stability. We are committed to continue our support of IFX 1.x with incremental corrections and member-driven content additions. But by creating a more forward-looking standard thread we can take advantage of technologies that have evolved and stabilized in the past decade. And we can more directly support the common business models that have evolved.

So, what’s in 2.0?

Even though we are going to make a technical break in some areas, we are confident that you will see the value added by these changes, and that your organization will be able to migrate effectively as you see the benefits of moving forward with us. Let’s take a look at a few of the significant changes in the business world that financial service providers confront today, as compared to a decade ago.

Service Providers or Web Services?

The prevailing wisdom a decade ago was that a variety of financial services companies would specialize in areas of core competency and partner with other specialists to provide ancillary or supporting services. This led to architectural decisions to support a multi-tiered messaging model, presupposing that messages would be forwarded through many servers and many organizations with disparate implementation techniques. This has proved to be a solid architectural decision.

But it also led to a “packaging” model based on the business concept of Service Providers. This has proven less valuable. Instead, the technology to support smaller, more discrete application services has evolved, and today businesses find themselves capable of assembling services on demand from a variety of application services.

Trust the Internet for e-commerce?

The reliability and security of the Internet infrastructure for financial activity were largely unproven 10 years ago. Would a message survive several server hops? Would the content be garbled? How could we know? How could we fix it if it failed? What role would the concept of a digital signature play? Today we know that the Internet is not a perfect technology, but most of us have an implicit trust that it generally works. Dell, eBay, Amazon and others do billions of dollars of on-line business daily. Home banking is assumed!

Now, we find ourselves much more concerned with protecting our privacy. We have very little doubt that data will get from point A to point B. It’s points C, D and E that worry us! We want to share enough data to get the business done, but none that is not required for the transaction at hand, to protect both parties in the transaction. Additionally, despite exponential growth in the speed of processing and the bandwidth of transaction channels, there is still a valid business case for micro-efficiency in the size and volume of exchanges between the participants in a transaction.

A number of design decisions for IFX 1.x were based on a pessimistic assumption about message transport reliability. And there was much less sensitivity to data privacy. We specified sign-on protocols to fill security gaps that no longer exist, or that are handled by the network infrastructure in other ways. We specified that large amounts of data be returned in message responses so that validation was readily supported.

In IFX 2.0 we support the concept of “light” objects and default to an assumption that most data does not need to be echoed in the message response. Our protocols for Inquiry, Audit and Synchronization are more than sufficient to discover and recover from the occasional communication glitch.

Here, read this!

The IFX Business Message Specification is unwieldy as a printed document. It exceeds 900 printed pages. When you add to this a Primer, several Implementation Guides and a Data Dictionary, it begins to look as if we have lost sight of the “electronic” in e-commerce.

With 2.0, we will present the specification as a hyper-linked, interactive document on our Web site. In addition to that, members will have free access to the underlying database repository that will become the IFX standard of record.

Interactive, Interoperative, International

From the start, the IFX Forum charter has been to develop and maintain standard specifications necessary to exchange financial data electronically -- independent of specific technology, independent of national boundaries, independent of corporate practices. We remain fully committed to these principles.

The specification will continue to be a Business Message Specification – independent of specific technology, but with plenty of technical guidance for implementation.

We will continue to cooperate with other standards organizations such as ACORD, ISO, ANSI, X12 and others – interoperating with their work whenever possible.

And we will continue to reach around the globe for perspective and expertise. Our current membership includes leading financial companies and individuals from North America, Central America, UK, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and Taiwan.

You want it when?!

We’ve been working on the diverse, interrelated threads of this release for quite a while, and within the past few months we have finalized the scope of the changes for this release. Our goal is to make the new release available for members to review and use as soon as possible. Because of the implications of this release on compatibility, we are allocating a generous amount of time for internal member review, so the public release will be scheduled several months later.

What’s in this for you?

We couldn’t do up a big enough laundry list to include all the possible benefits for every type of organization, but we do have one suggestion: Join us! And generate your own specific list of advantages. By working with us to complete IFX 2.0, you can influence the contents of the early releases, ensuring that they are optimized for your market and your needs.

If you have been an IFX Forum member in the past, you will be pleased to see how we have evolved to make more use of available technology. And we still know how to have a good time. Come to our next Face-to-Face meeting and see for yourself. If you are an interested outsider, these invitations are extended to you as well. Meeting information is linked from www.ifxforum.org.

Sincerely,

Richard P. Urban
President, IFX Forum, Inc.